"Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War," by former Defense secretary Robert Gates, went on sale this week. / Jacquelyn Martin, AP

by Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

by Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

One thing has puzzled me about the MRAP story: Why nobody, so far as we know, has been held accountable for the delays in having them fielded.

Former Defense secretary Robert Gates, in his new book, provides the definitive account of the bureaucratic debris he kicked from their path to the troops who needed them. As we've written often, he learned in USA TODAY about the safety the trucks provide to troops from roadside bombs and made them the Pentagon's top priority.

Gates writes that he called for a briefing after reading the report on April 19, 2007. I had been traveling with Gates, and the story had been written in advance so that it would run when we visited Fallujah, Iraq. His military assistant, then-Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, made sure that he saw it. Incidentally, the main source for that story, then-Brig. Gen. John Allen, would go to attain four stars and lead all forces in Afghanistan before he retired last year.

Gates was unfamiliar with the trucks, whose raised V-shaped hull protected troops from bombs buried in roads. By the end of 2006, when Gates became Defense secretary, improvised explosive devices accounted for 80% of U.S. casualties in Iraq. He visited maimed, burned troops who had been in Humvees - "funeral pyres for our troops."

How was it that a newspaper reporter, who had been on the Pentagon beat for only a few months more, was the one to inform Gates about MRAPs?

He writes that he had to pick up our paper again, a few months later to find out the Pentagon knew about the trucks and had tested them but gave them to Iraqi forces first. Later an urgent request from the Marines for MRAPs was shelved for 15 months.

"Multiple explanations have been put forward for the delay in getting MRAPs to Iraq," Gates writes. "The most significant is that no one at a senior level wanted to spend the money to buy them. The services did not want to spend procurement dollars on a vehicle that was not the long-term Army and Marine Corps replacement for the Humvee - the joint light tactical vehicle."

Gates got his first briefing on April 27 when he had returned from the Middle East. He found out that 6,000 had been ordered but only 1,300 had been built. No money was available to pay for them.

"Business as usual," he writes.

Gates called a meeting on May 2 of top officials to discuss it. In attendance: Gates' top deputy, the secretaries of the Army and Navy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I didn't often get passionate at meetings, but in this one I laid down a marker I would use again and again concerning MRAPs: 'Every delay of a single day costs one or more of our kids his limbs or his life.' To my chagrin, not a single senior official, civilian or military, supported my proposal for a crash program to buy thousands of these vehicles."

Yet as far as we know - and it's likely we would - no senior official was ever fired for failing to provide troops in combat with equipment proven to save their lives. We do know that a lower-level whistle-blower who called attention to the delays, Marine Corps science adviser Franz Gayl, suffered for it. The Marine Corps tried for years to have him fired. He still works there.

Ultimately, the Pentagon - only because of Gates' persistence - embarked on a $40 billion program to build 27,000 of the trucks for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"To those who contended then, and still do, that MRAPs were unnecessary and a costly one-dimensional, one-time-use vehicle that detracted from more important long-term priorities, I offer only this response: talk to the countless troops who survived IED blasts because they were riding in an MRAP."

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